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Last semester I took an introductory level computer science course. I was one of three women in the room of around 50 students. We had one TA, who would communicate with male students, laugh at their jokes, compliment their coding. Whenever I asked him a question, he would deny the validity of the question and then start yelling at me. One day, I was confused about how to deal with input to function prototypes, so I asked him about it. He interrupted me mid-sentence and said, “No”. He started talking about how it was “wrong”. He would not let me finish my question, let alone answer it. I decided to end our exchange, so I told him “Okay, thanks.” He glared at me and sneered, “Do you even know what a function is?”. I am a senior and a math major. I said, “Yes”. He scoffed, muttered “Yeah, right…” and walked away.

I was only able to successfully ask him one question that entire semester, when I was sitting next to another, very serious, female student and he had to deal with us both as a unit.